Surely ascribing any kind of, even theoretical or notional, physicality to God is idolatry - the use of ‘He’, or ‘She’, implies merely a ‘personhood’ or ‘being’.
Would that include the Incarnation – the idea that one Person of a three-personed single Godhead took on human form? (A similar question could be asked in Hinduism, by the way, to keep this from being a total-Christianity hijack.)
I maintain that the problem lies in the lack of human conceptualization of a Person who is not endowed with a bodily gender (and recent discussions about the nature of transsexual individuals might be instructive in dealing with the question of what gender “really” is). Martin Ibn Martin’s comment about the Arabic pronoun “Hu” is really intriguing in this regard.
For us Christians (including Shodan), the conceptualization has got to be that God is three Persons (who have to be conceived of in human terms, however inadequate, in order to preserve their nature as Persons) – one of whom took on human form as a male individual. Please note that God’s chosen people were a group who were patriarchal, and that Jesus came and taught in a society that was predominantly patriarchal in its nature. Having God send the Second Person of Himself as a baby girl who was His Only-Begotten Daughter would have put Her in a very different and much more unusual role, one harder for the Jews and Grecianized cosmopolitan society of the Roman Empire to have assimilated. And that the single metaphor chosen by Jesus as descriptive of the role of the First Person of the Trinity was that of a Loving Father – real, close, and personal – not an abstract Judge or Creative Spirit. That that metaphor implies masculinity is inherent in the patriarchal society in which He taught, not in the nature of God Himself. I’m with Shodan in that the language of God the Parent and God the Child (which my church did experiment with) loses something in the gender-neutrality – it doesn’t convey the flavor of up-close personness that Father and Son do.
God is beyond our comprehension – we cannot grok God, to employ Heinlein’s useful neologism for total comprehension. We can know Him only as He reveals Himself, and that in human terms. Any attempt to grasp what He is in other than human terms has got to be abstract conceptualization that in becoming abstract loses the concrete nature of individual I:Thou relationship which is key to one’s personal connection to Him.
Even in saying this I am employing limiting terms that are not appropriate to talking about God.
“Incarnation” <shudder>
Fortunately for me, being Jewish, I don’t have the problem you were addressing; my use of ‘personhood’ and linking to ‘being’ should be taken to imply that God is not an ‘it’ but an entity with whom human beings could have a relationship.
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*Originally posted by Polycarp *
I absolutely will not dispute the claim that Hebrew society was strongly paternalistic – though it might interest you to know that women were accorded a signficantly higher role in society among them than among most of their neighbors.
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You could probably also claim that slaves were treated better in society among them. That does make slavery good or right.
**
We are in agreement there.
Prejudice? When it assigns women to a second-class status, I’m prejudiced for objecting to it?
Or maybe you just think I’m uppity.
Medicine evolves from our need to heal, air conditioning evolves from a need to keep cool. Both are invented.
This implies there is something that a father can do that a mother CAN’T.
Never intended to be a vehicle for male dominance? Then how did it just happen to work out that way?
And if it wasn’t intended to foster male dominance, why conceive of a god with male sex at all? And why are the two oldest of the religions – Judaism and Catholicism – the ones with centuries of refusal to ordain women?
Ooooh, tell me more about ‘ordination’ in Judaism.